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'Yes, we might try quite a party...' and added, 'quite noisy and gay. I hope your friend's talkative!' Macmaster said something about trouble.

'Oh, it can't be too much trouble,' she said. 'Besides it might do my husband good.' She went on: 'Mr Duchemin is apt to brood. It's perhaps too lonely here.' And added the rather astonishing words: 'After all.'

And, driving back in the fly, Macmaster said to himself that you couldn't call Mrs Duchemin ordinary, at least. Yet meeting her was like going into a room that you had long left and never ceased to love. It felt good. It was perhaps partly her Edinburgh-ness. Macmaster allowed himself to coin that word. There was in Edinburgh a society--he himself had never been privileged to move in it, but its annals are part of the literature of Scotland!--where the ladies are all great ladies in tall drawing-rooms; circumspect yet shrewd: still yet with a sense of the comic: frugal yet warmly hospitable. It was perhaps just Edinburgh-ness that was wanting in the drawing-rooms of his friends in London. Mrs Cressy, the Hon. Mrs Limoux and Mrs Delawnay were all almost perfection in manner, in speech, in composure. But, then they were not young, they weren't Edinburgh--and they weren't strikingly elegant!

Mrs Duchemin was all three. Her assured, tranquil manner she would retain to any age: it betokened the enigmatic soul of her sex, but, physically, she couldn't be more than thirty. That was unimportant, for she would never want to do anything in which physical youth counted. She would never, for instance, have occasion to run: she would always just 'move'--floatingly! He tried to remember the details of her dress.

It had certainly been dark blue--and certainly of silk: that rather coarsely woven, exquisite material that has on it folds as of a silvery shimmer with minute knots. But very dark blue. And it contrived to be at once artistic---absolutely in the tradition! And yet well cut! Very large sleeves, of course, but still with a certain fit. She had worn an immense necklace of yellow polished amber: on the dark blue! And Mrs Duchemin had said, over her husband's roses, that the blossoms always reminded her of little mouldings of pink cloud come down for the cooling of the earth...A charming thought!

Suddenly he said to himself:

'What a mate for Tietjens I' And his mind added: 'Why should she not become an Influence!'

A vista opened before him in time! He imagined Tietjens, in some way proprietarily responsible for Mrs Duchemin: quite pour le bon, tranquilly passionate and accepted, motif; and 'immensely improved' by the association. And himself, in a year or two, bringing the at last found Lady of his Delight to sit at the feet of Mrs Duchemin--the Lady of his Delight whilst circumspect would be also young and impressionable!--to learn the mysterious assuredness of manner, the gift of dressing, the knack of wearing amber and bending over standard roses--and the Edinburgh-ness!

Macmaster was thus not a little excited, and finding Tietjens at tea amid the green-stained furnishings and illustrated papers of the large, corrugated-iron golf-house, he could not help exclaiming:

'I've accepted the invitation to breakfast with the Duchemins to-morrow for us both. I hope you won't mind,' although Tietjens was sitting at a little table with General Campion and his brother-in-law, the Hon. Paul Sandbach, Conservative member for the division and husband of Lady Claudine. The General said pleasantly to Tietjens:

'Breakfast! With Duchemin! You go, my boy! You'll get the best breakfast you ever had in your life.'

He added to his brother-in-law: 'Not the eternal mock kedgeree Claudine gives us every morning.'

Sandbach grunted:

'It's not for want of trying to steal their cook. Claudine has a shy at it every time we come down here.'

The General said pleasantly to Macmaster--he spoke always pleasantly, with a half smile and a slight sibilance:

'My brother-in-law isn't serious, you understand. My sister wouldn't think of